The present invention relates musical performance guiding devices and methods and recording media recording thereon a musical performance guiding program and data.
In recent years, keyboard-type electronic musical instruments have been in practical use which are equipped with a performance or key depression guiding function to sequentially indicate each key to be depressed in such a manner that even a beginner-class player can play music well according to the indicated key. Most ordinary form of the key depression guiding function is by turning on or lighting a LED (Light Emitting Diode) associated with each key to be depressed at predetermined key depression (key-on) timing. More sophisticated form of the key depression guiding function is by lighting a LED associated with each key to be depressed in a first or preliminary display mode in advance of its predetermined key-on timing and then relighting the LED in a second display mode upon arrival at the key-on timing, as typically known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,703,681.
Some of the known key depression guiding devices, including the one disclosed in the above-referenced U.S. patent, are designed to carry out the preliminary or preannouncing LED lighting by a scheme of reading out preannouncing data stored in different tracks from those for tone generating or performance data which are used also as actual key-depression timing indicating data, or by another scheme of pre-reading tone generating data in advance of their actual readout timing.
However, the first-said preannouncing LED lighting scheme based on the preannouncing data stored separately from the tone generating data is disadvantageous in that extra tracks are necessary for storage of the preannouncing data, considerably reducing the number of the tracks available for the tone generating data. The second preannouncing LED lighting scheme based on the pre-reading of the tone generating data is also disadvantageous in that extra operations are necessary for pre-reading the tone generating data in addition to the operations for reading these data at their actual readout timing, making the operations very complex as a whole. Further, because the tone generating data must be prestored within the device in order to permit the pre-reading of the tone generating data, the second preannouncing LED lighting scheme would not work in applications where the tone generating data are supplied from an external device on a real-tome basis.